The Standard's Beat Knife Crime charter

1. More targeted high-profile searches backed up by more police with scanners on the streets, on public transport and inside and outside schools, with targeted patrols on routes to and from schools.

Targeted stops and searches for knives and weapons are effective and increasingly backed by all sections of the community. In the past two weeks alone, police seized 200 knives from youths in London, targeting high knife crime areas. Knife scanners have also proved effective. The British Transport Police say scanners have helped halve the number of robberies on the Underground and railway stations. Knife carriers use transport hubs such as rail and bus stations while Met statistics show a high number of robberies at knifepoint involve children outside school. Targeted school patrols — backed by the Met's 185 dedicated school officers — will crack down on juvenile knife crime. Using scanners in schools is more challenging but where they are backed by schools themselves they deter pupils from carrying knives.

2. Train children in "peer-to-peer mentoring" and use citizenship and personal, social and health education to teach the simple message: respect cannot be won at the point of a knife.

Education will be important to ensure future generations grow up without any illusions about the devastation knives cause — and with the skills to avoid getting involved. Schools should focus on compulsory personal, social and health — as well as citizenship — lessons on teaching children about the importance of treating each other with respect.

But the responsibility goes far wider than schools to embrace every section of society — from parents to the media responsible for creating films, music and computer games that can influence young people's behaviour. The Mayor's advisers, among others, believe that investment in youth clubs and mentoring schemes, particularly for those excluded from school, are vital to divert youngsters away from crime.

On another level, Sir Alan Steer, the leader of the government's behaviour task force, urges parents to take greater control over the music their children listen to. But this culture change will take many years to achieve.

3. Prosecute everybody found with a knife or using it to the full extent of the law: no more police cautions and no more second chances.

Until last autumn when the Met and the Crown Prosecution Service announced a new, tougher, charging policy, offenders caught with knives were frequently let off with a caution.

This was particularly the case with juveniles, but even adults regularly received the same lenient treatment, despite admitting their offence, with the result that hundreds of knife offenders each year in London were escaping justice.

Police and prosecutors have now promised that cautions will be given only in truly exceptional circumstances — such as when a person has taken a knife out for a legitimate purpose such as fishing and then genuinely forgotten to leave it behind on a subsequent occasion — and that all other offenders will be brought before the courts.

Today's charter calls for this pledge by the Met and the CPS to be fully delivered to ensure that justice is done in every case and for there to be no relaxation of this new, more robust, approach if and when the currently intense spotlight of public and media scrutiny dims.

4. Use the toughest possible sentences on knife criminals: end the slap on the wrist culture which lets offenders walk free.

The maximum sentence for carrying a blade was recently doubled from two to four years in an earlier Government attempt to respond to public concern about the growth of knife crime in Britain — but, in practice, offenders are treated far more leniently.

The latest Ministry of Justice figures, which cover 2006, show that only 17 per cent of the 6,232 people convicted of carrying a blade that year were jailed and of those just 26 received more than a 12-month sentence.

Many were given an absolute or a conditional discharge — effectively a slap on the wrist and no more — and the average sentence for those given a custodial term was less than four months.

However, last week the country's second most senior judge, Sir Igor Judge, urged colleagues to impose the "most severe" penalties to combat what he described as an "epidemic" of knife crime, a call backed yesterday by Britain's most senior police officer, the Met police commissioner Sir Ian Blair.

Today's charter strongly supports this tougher approach to sentencing to act as a strong deterrent to those who cannot be diverted away from knife crime by other means — as well as keeping dangerous offenders off the streets.

5. Make prison work with compulsory therapy for young prisoners in which they come face-to-face with the consequences of their crimes by meeting victims and the doctors who treated them.

Prison staff do seek to rehabilitate offenders, but all the evidence suggests that their existing efforts are insufficient and regularly fail to ensure that convicts turn away from crime after their release.

There are many causes for this, most linked to prison overcrowding, including the trend for inmates to be moved regularly from jail to jail which disrupts rehabilitation work and educational programmes and weakens the links between offenders, probation staff, social workers and others who are meant to help them reintegrate into society upon their release.

Where success does occur it is often where pioneering methods such as "restorative justice" — generally used outside prison — or similar techniques are deployed to make offenders confront the consequences of their crime, sometimes with face-to-face meetings with their victims.

What penal reformers, and indeed ministers and the prison authorities themselves, do say, however, is that such methods, rather than simple incarceration alone, are the way to achieve long-term success.

Click here to see a map showing the teenage victims of knife crime in 2008